Posted November 15, 2014 4:37 PM ET; Last updated November 18, 2014 9:21 PM ET
MIT professor of economics, Jonathan Gruber, at his home.
Photo: Getty Images
http://nypost.com/2014/11/18/
Obama praised ‘bright ideas’ of health-care architect who called voters stupid
By Marisa Schultz
November 18, 2014 | 2:26am
Published on Nov 17, 2014
"You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee; Jon Gruber; my dear friend, Jim Wallis here, who can inform what are sometimes dry policy debates with a prophetic voice."
[See YouTube for more Jonathan Gruber]
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[From article]
Now, a series of government contracts totaling more than $2 million for consulting services provided by the Harvard-trained economics professor are coming under scrutiny.
Eight states hired Gruber to help design their health exchanges after he banked nearly $400,000 in 2009 through contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services, records show.
Gruber and a handful of colleagues got state contracts totaling $1.6 million over seven years from Michigan ($481,000), Minnesota ($329,000), Vermont ($400,000) and Wisconsin ($400,000), The Washington Post reported.
He also advised Colorado, Connecticut, Maine and West Virginia.
It’s not clear how much those states added to his bank account.
[. . .]
“And Obama’s like well . . . He’s really a realistic guy,” he continued. “He’s like, ‘Look I can’t just do this. It’s just not going to happen politically . . . How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ ”
http://nypost.com/2014/11/15/
ObamaCare architect was paid over $2M for consultation
By Geoff Earle
November 15, 2014 | 1:44am
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[From article]
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber — the MIT brainiac caught on video admitting the law’s “lack of transparency” was meant to dupe a gullible American public — could end up becoming Obamacare’s demolition man, with congressional Republicans threatening to hold hearings and experts saying his bombshell comments could impact the Supreme Court case challenging the Affordable Care Act.
“They can subpoena him and call him to testify about the way he used federal money because he got an awful lot of it,” said Dennis Hale, a Boston College political science professor, referring to reports yesterday that Gruber received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants to help states implement Obamacare. “If he shows up to testify, it’s going to be pretty ugly.”
“This is the gift that keeps on giving,” Hale said. “If you’re selling a product that people don’t want to buy and then tell them they’re stupid because they don’t want to buy it, you get into trouble.”
[. . .]
In the latest video to be released — the fourth this week — Gruber appears to make the case against the subsidies, telling an audience that if states don’t set up their own exchanges, they won’t receive tax credits.
[. . .]
“The dirty secret in Massachusetts is the feds pay for our bill,” Gruber said in a Jan. 18, 2012, video. “In Massachusetts, we had a very powerful senator you may know named Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy ... and smart people in Massachusetts had basically figured out a way to sort of rip off the feds for about $400 million a year.”
[. . .]
“That, to be honest, is political,” Gruber said. “You got to say you like small businesses in America or you’re Communist.”
http://www.bostonherald.com/
MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber's gaffes could derail Obamacare
Saturday, November 15, 2014
By: Chris Cassidy
Boston Herald
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[From article]
On both sides of the Capitol, leading conservatives said they may call economist Jonathan Gruber to testify about his remarks, which were made last year and surfaced this week in a video on social media. In the video, Gruber suggests that the administration’s signature health-care legislation passed in part because of the “stupidity of the American voter” and a “lack of transparency” over its funding mechanisms.
“The strategy was to hide the truth from the American people,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who is slated to chair the Senate Budget Committee next year. “That is a threat to the American republic.”
[. . .]
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said during the discussion. “And basically, call it the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
GOP’s anti-Obamacare push gains new momentum in wake of Gruber video
By Robert Costa and Jose A. DelReal
November 12, 2014 at 8:47 PM
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MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber
Photo by: Angela Rowlings
[From article]
So here’s this geeky nerd, overeducated, greedy, pompous, thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room while simultaneously engineering a public-policy disaster of the first magnitude — and not only is he from Massachusetts, he’s from Cambridge.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Why is it that Massachusetts produces so many of these “pointedy-headed intellectuals who can’t park a bicycle straight,” as the late Democrat George C. Wallace used to say?
Do you realize that every last one of the many disasters that has befallen this nation in the last half-century can be traced right back here to the banks of the Charles River?
[. . .]
This goober, I mean Gruber, now says that when he sneered about how stupid Americans are, he made a mistake. Oddly, he made the same “mistake” five times (and counting). When you say something publicly five times, it’s part of your stump speech.
[. . .]
Asked about Prof. Goober, Nancy Pelosi said, “Who he?” Then some video was produced of Madame Botox citing his no-bid brilliance. A moonbat in-the-satchel reporter from Vox pooh-poohed the goober’s role as “mostly number-crunching.” Two years earlier this same bumkisser said he “pretty much wrote Obamacare.”
[. . .]
How much do you want to bet this pampered puke from Cambridge has a trust fund? And that he thinks anyone who wasn’t born with one is … stupid.
http://www.bostonherald.com/
Carr: Jonathan Gruber is just another goober from Cambridge
Saturday, November 15, 2014
By: Howie Carr
Boston Herald
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